This is the first time I've heard of WWOOFing. Neat. I don't care much about organic farming, but it seems like an interesting apprenticeship/activism model.
1,944 karma · joined August 12, 2019
The feeling you're describing is literally panic from an anxiety disorder. If it it's interfering with your adult responsibilities (like going to the doctor), that's the right time to use medication to get through it.
I think the idea would be to keep everyone safe and ideally give them pathways back to normal society, not create a permanent underclass.
If a significant percentage of the population wants to take advantage of such a program, that probably means society is doing something else wrong unrelated to drug or housing policy.
The pills are incredibly cheap to manufacture.
A few things would happen if we started handing out opiods for free:
* petty crime would decrease -- it's not the drug that causes the crime, it's trying to pay for the drug
* organized crime would decrease -- moving opiods is a lucrative operation, and our addicts are bankrolling very bad people by doing business with them
* users would get clean product -- opiods laced with fentanyl are a huge problem and responsible for the majority of hospitalizations and overdose deaths
* more users could hold stable employment and rehabilitate themselves -- i've known plenty of opiods addicts, but you'd never know they had a problem, because they were all rich tech workers that were not stealing to satisfy their addiction
* most injection users would be pill users if it wasn't so expensive -- giving them free pills would encourage a less risky route of administration and decrease sepsis cases
If we still have a homeless problem after that, communal housing outside of the city with free drugs might be enough to get them to relocate to where they're not a problem and in considerably less danger.
But then I remember that we live in a god-fearing christian nation, where drugs are bad and addicts should be shunned, so my plan probably won't work.
This completely misses the point. You don't "pick a pattern" and choose to apply it.
Design patterns are a way to take your best solution and describe how it works to other programmers.
For example you might say something like: "We used a singleton here because we can barely manage to get one instance working correctly and never intend to write tests".
I wish we had a better word for what strenholme is doing besides "maintainer".
To have known the deceased and decide to continue their work is something special indeed.
I wonder if there's a way to match with equally wealthy partners. I suspect there aren't that many out there.
You mean like these?
* https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
In a bull market, anyone can make money with just about any bet.
That's going to age like milk.
Yes, I believe we lost the public nature of the internet by adopting regulation like the DMCA.
> How would any third-party client win the inevitable arms race this would initiate and what would stop your system from re-centralizing?
Attrition. Facebook would have to realize at some point that they can't stop their client from being reversed and can't prevent clones from popping up. Right now, they can stop that, but they stop it with laws not with technology. Without that protection, Facebook could never keep up with the whole internet collectively reverse engineering their apps out in the open. Also FB engineers would know that being on the DRM team is a waste of time and nobody would want to do the work.
> Also how would any infrastructure become 'public' when it can't marshall the public interest or allocate resources via legislation?
As another commenter pointed out, I shouldn't have used the term "public infrastructure" when referring to the internet, because it's largely privately owned and not regulated as a public utility, which is true.
What I mean is that if you're going to open up a public web server and publish a free app in an app store, I should be able to interact with your servers however that app does it without committing a crime. And I should be able to publish my own app that interacts with your servers too, without your claim to intellectual property standing in the way.
I think this would cause companies like Twitter and Facebook to lose their entire market, but the core of the service would be maintained by the community of people interested in the service.
So for example, if there were 10 Twitter clients allowed to exist and be above-board companies, and they captured 80% of the Twitter client market share, then there could be a serious push to invent or adopt a new protocol to serve their users and de-federate Twitter themselves if they don't want to go along with the protocol.
I think that's a really solvable technical problem and all the privacy activists would have great reason to pick up an editor and join the fight. But as it is now, regulation has made that type of activity illegal, because it would infringe on Twitter's rights.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, these discussions are much more interesting on HN than anywhere else on the internet.
Your line of thinking really drives me crazy because I feel like we're so close to agreeing. The horseshoe is almost touching in this thread.
I don't know enough about China to know if their societal engineering efforts are considered successful, but I do know enough to see the parallels to the regulatory solutions that you're floating.
I think these are all well intentioned but terrible ideas:
> can only have X percent profit margin
Profit margins can be engineered with creative accounting. You can't practically do this.
> Force companies to invest
I don't even know how you would force a company to invest in something. Generally you'd tax or subsidize them, but in either case you're disrupting market forces.
> maybe we say that facebook has to open up their internal APIs
This would actually help the situation in the short term, but it's still not a good idea. Facebook would continue asserting intellectual property rights on the data they serve and entrench them as a public utility. The goal here should be to create an environment that's hostile to Facebook by protecting them less.
> forcing the ad marketplace to operate like a 'lit' exchange
The ad marketplace doesn't need to be transparent, because Facebook can't actually compete for attention if they lose government protection of their IP or government protection from the harm caused by their UGC. If Facebook didn't have these protections, we wouldn't need to worry about the marketplace because their business would fail.
Though Facebook is currently in a position to easily commit undetectable fraud on ad buyers. The low quality of their market should be another reason to not use Facebook. The reason we don't have a transparent and competitive ad market is because Facebook gets to decide the rules for their marketplace.
> Facebook should've never been allowed to buy Instagram.
I don't think they should have been prevented from buying Instagram. If they didn't own them, they'd just share data anyway for mutual benefit. Who owns the stock is separate to me from the abusive products they produce.
> forcing social media networks to pay news media sites for their content
News media sites are their own problem, but they shouldn't get a special carve out for being paid to be indexed. If they don't want their content public on the internet, they shouldn't publish it. Once they do, they should assume it can be liberally indexed/mirrored/redistributed.
I think we'll ultimately see blockchain solutions take over the space, because fundamentally they work and are an unstoppable technology.
It's also possible that all these regulations don't have any of their intended effects, but are still successful in crippling Facebook by making its operation very restricted. In other words, use regulation to make Facebook a worse product, to the point where the users organically leave.
The best outcome would be if we simply got rid of all these silly intellectual property protections and let the chips fall where they may. That would end a lot of media companies, but it'd be better than the problems they've caused.
A good outcome is that social media companies eventually lose their users organically, through some combination of onerous regulations that can't apply to decentralized projects, and new technologies that don't fit their business model simply being better.
A bad outcome is if governments adopts social media in official ways, it becomes essential to government business and therefore gets regulated into permanence. This blurs the line between what it means to have a Facebook account as opposed to an internet connection. That's probably where Facebook will take us if they can write the regulations. Maybe to vote or do some other government business, I'll need to let Facebook verify my identity, which will be fine, because it's totally regulated and normal.
I've read a lot of posts on HN about the "aha" moment of people using metamask for the first time. I think we're going to see a new wave of internet technologies that obsolete things like Facebook and Twitter very quickly. They might also be way more damaging and worse, but they won't be companies and they won't be able to be regulated. I'm not sure how that plays out, but we'll figure it out when we get there, because that's where we're going.
I believe that legislation got us into the Facebook problem in the first place. If you disagree, please take the time to correct me instead of downvoting my opinion out of existence. I'm open to a change of mind. Here's how I see it:
All of these social media companies have one thing in common: they exist to sell ads. We don't really know what Facebook would have looked like as a subscription service, because it wouldn't have ever become dominant.
For ads to work best, they have to be targeted at users. This incentivizes data collection that helps with ad targeting, which is pretty much everything.
But for ads to work at all, the user has to actually see the ad. This incentivizes engagement, because you need attention on your ad for the ad to have value. If you need engagement, you have to find a way to reach users. This is quite good if your business is selling ads, as you already have all of the data. And so the cycle of collecting and using data for acquisition goes on forever.
Since the very beginning of the ad business, companies like DoubleClick (later acquired by Google) have stretched the limits of web technology to make all of this work. Pixel bugs, cookies, app SDKs, all kinds of tricks, anything they can do to get more data about the user, because that's the gas that makes the whole engine run.
Users, however, are prevented by government regulation from stretching the limits of technology to fight back against these companies.
Have you ever wondered why there isn't a large market for paid alternative Twitter clients that cut out ads and data collection? There used to be, back when Twitter had a very permissive view of their data. Then Twitter changed the rules and now it's a grey area if using their private API with an app-extracted key is a crime or not. It's certainly not something you can build a company on.
So the situation here is that social media companies rely on you not being able to "hack" because there are legal protections on how you can interface with their public-facing internet servers and what you can do with the data that those servers send in reply. Because of legislation like the DMCA, paid for by media companies, users never even got the chance to fight on the same technical battleground where they were already being exploited by ad companies.
As I see it, these companies are using public infrastructure when it suits them. If a computer client is allowing third-party cookies, well, that's just downright reasonable to use for ad tracking. But if you alter a query string, you might be a criminal. That's where regulation has got us.
If Facebook is to be regulated, you can be sure that they'll write the regulation.
My litmus test for if there's a free market situation here: Are you free to make an alternative ad-free Facebook client that uses private APIs extracted from the real Facebook app? Because if the answer to that is no, as it has been since these companies have existed, then no amount of regulation is going to improve the situation.
User rights and privacy is a fight we could win technically without some very specific computer and copyright laws. We need to get back to the idea of the internet being public infrastructure.
If there was some change to the law that suddenly let people build better Facebook clients without fear of being sued into oblivion or even arrested, then I think we could finally get these companies under control.
You're asking all the right questions.
Lately, it seems that the only thing that matters is passing the vibe check.
Things that surprisingly pass the vibe check:
* "long time no see" or "no can do" -- making fun of broken English (particularly Chinese and Native American)
* "got gypped" -- clearly insulting toward gypsies
* criticism from the "peanut gallery" -- that's a reference to poor seating for black people during the Vaudeville era, which is super racist by any standard
Things that unsurprisingly don't pass the vibe check but should if people were more educated:
* "jimmies" for sprinkles has a pop culture reputation for being racist and people have corrected me for saying it, but actually ice cream sprinkles were just invented by a guy named James
* "niggardly" shares no root with its racist homophone
* "那个" is a filler word that chinese speakers need to be careful with because of the same racist homophone
I get that language is always evolving and the vibe check does matter to lots of people, so I try to accommodate the sensibilities of the masses.
I know that "niggardly" is so uncommon these days that it practically is a racist dog whistle (though it really shouldn't be), so I wouldn't use it in daily speech.
But I also think it would be a shame if all the interesting turns of phrase that have stuck around over the years are intentionally censored and removed until we have nothing but bland language without metaphor or history or anything that could possibly cause offense.
"Opening the kimono" is certainly not a phrase worth censoring. I think you could make a good faith argument that trying to censor it is actually a reflection of racist and sexist American stereotypes about Japanese people.
If your mental image of a kimono wearer is a vulnerable Japanese woman, as it may be if you are an American that's still reverberating with echos of WW2 racism, then Ashley's disgust makes some sense.
Apparently not.
There's almost 0 chance that managers at Apple got the colloquialism wrong and were using it in any sort of sexual or racist way. And if they were, Ashley would have surely brought it to light. This was not a misunderstanding.
What happened here is that Ashley thought the term sounded offensive enough to weaponize, and so she did.
From the Slack reaction emojis, and from our own sibling HN comments, we can tell other people also feel grossed out by the "open kimono" phrase. Particularly people who have never heard it before.
The obvious conclusion is that the phrase just doesn't pass the vibe check in 2021, and no additional research is required. It sounds kind of old and maybe a little racist or sexist, so anyone that uses it needs to be called out, so we can erase this uncomfortable phrase from the tech lexicon. Problem solved?
The real problem is that adopting such a niggardly view of workplace language leads to precisely the type of in-group/out-group division and discrimination that people like Ashley claim to be fighting against. Of course, if it works, she ends up in the in-group with power because she knows the rules. The in-group is then free to exclude other cultures because they're seen as crude or offensive or somehow "less than" the enlightened rule makers of civil society.
The phrase comes from Japanese<->American business relationships in the 70s through 90s. It is not sexist or racist. It literally means providing transparency to internal affairs.
> Strange to hear an Apple manager using it, but I wouldn't assume they were implying anything or had ill intent.
"Look, I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will sort of open the kimono on Xerox Parc." -- Steve Jobs, Xerox Parc, 1979
Under the Xerox Parc kimono, he found a prototype of the modern computer mouse.
Ashley's source for why this is offensive and my source for why it's not are the same (from her screenshot): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/open-kimono.asp
Investopedia says the term is "offensive" but the only reason they cite is an NYT article from 1998:
> New York Times reporter Stephen Greenhouse became one of the first to draw broad attention to the term when he noted that marketers at Microsoft (MSFT) had embraced it. At the time, he did caution that the use of open kimono may have originally indicated a disrespectful attitude toward the Japanese businessmen who were buying American companies.
It wasn't even disrespectful because of race, it was because Japanese businessmen were buying lots of American companies and doing due diligence. Also, kimonos are worn by men, women, and children.
In reality, Investopedia is probably labeling it "offensive" for people like me who know it is not offensive, but are unaware that using it could lead to problems.
If you need a ruby engineer, don't submit them to a generic hiring panel. Have them spend an hour or two talking shop and doing some pair programming with one of your most expert rubyists. Master craftsmen can pick each other out in a second, but a whole hiring panel can fail to spot both bullshit and greatness.
Don't sell yourself short! You're surrounded by tons of people that never get their fill of content. Just relax and let it happen ;)
That's pretty much the plan, but you lose me after that.
> The position fills the hole in life that would otherwise show up soon
The purpose of every life decision that I've made so far is to avoid ever having to work a job again again. I don't understand how anyone can "have fun" or "feel valuable" due to employment. Nobody would be there unless they were being paid for it, because all those coworkers were not there before they started getting paid (excluding interns, but that's also an oppressive dynamic).
The only data point I have is that school sucked while I was there. People told me I would miss it so much when I got older. They were very wrong. School sucked and was a huge waste of time. College was also a huge waste of time. I don't miss any of it at all.
The only thing that makes my career not a waste of time is that it will provide for a future where I can pursue my own interests without threat of hunger and homelessness.
I recognize that my position is considered extreme, and I'd like to be convinced otherwise. The only argument I ever hear is "oh you'll be so bored, you'll see, you'll come back" and it doesn't make any sense to me.
If I make it through a few more years of this, I'll find the answer and report back :)
My actual choices are to labor aggressively in the hopes of some day entering the investor class that doesn't need to labor for survival, or to do less labor and hope socialism builds me a safety net before I run out of funds.
If there's another option, I'd like to hear it, but I'm already pretty far down the capitalist route.
Also, the pandemic has really shattered any illusion that we could all work together to achieve any sort of universal good, which probably makes capitalism a better bet.
Thankfully, most public companies don't seem to have management that will look at your vesting schedule and try to abuse you maximally. I'm really not sure why, they probably should be doing that.
Alternate phrasing: If you don't have the financial ability to stop working, you can't quit your job. Your sanity is not worth it.
> I needed to completely remove any feelings of pressure, or any external, and internal, obligations. “You decide what to watch on Netflix because I literally can’t.” I’ve eaten more takeout in the last few months, than the whole pandemic; I didn’t have the energy to shop for groceries, or cook. I desperately needed to enjoy things again - so I could remember what that was like - so I could get back to enjoying ‘productive’ things too. Remember that producing recovery, relaxation, or joy for yourself is still being productive.
There are loads of people that don't even bother with cooking or groceries or enjoying things or having a sense of productivity. A lot of us are busy doing the capitalism because capital is the only sensible way to escape labor and any disruption would be very costly.
What the author considers "burned out", most would consider just another day. It only becomes "burnout" when you're wealthy enough to consider converting your labor time into self-care time for some months.
Also, taking time off is probably not even good advice. If you've always been miserable with the employed lifestyle, you're probably going to be just as miserable when you are forced back to it. Maybe more so.
Plus you lose out on those months of earnings, which is not good because 4 months of pay now is way better than 4 months of pay in the future. Assuming, that the goal is to eventually not be forced to sell your time for money.
> My boyfriend told me to stop working. It wasn’t work, and it was great. I was learning something. Completing something. Doing something because I wanted to do it, not because it was the next urgent thing that needed to happen. It felt like work used to feel like. That’s what I’m looking forward to again.
I have no idea how someone whose career path is McKinsey->Google->GitHub could possibly have a great work experience where they're learning and building and following their personal interests because they wanted to do it and not because it was the next urgent thing to build.
Maybe I just really suck at working in tech, or PM jobs are way easier than engineering jobs, but everything feels very urgent for my employer while actually being a giant waste of time for me personally. I do it because of the compensation, which I invest, so eventually I won't have to do it anymore.